14 DAY TRIAL // You won't believe this, but Greg Kroah-Hartman announced today, January 12, 2017, the release of the third maintenance update to the Linux 4.9 kernel stable series, just three days after the release of Linux kernel 4.9.2.
From the appended shortlog, it looks like there are a total of 201 files changed in this third point release of Linux kernel 4.9, with 1929 insertions and 945 deletions, so we can only think that all these patches were out for a while now, but they didn't make it into the mainline kernel because of the Christmas and New Year's holidays. However, they are more than welcome and are really great work.
"I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.3 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary," said Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Lots of XFS improvements, numerous updated drivers
As the headline suggests, a big part of the Linux kernel 4.9.3 patch are various improvements for the XFS file system, but as expected, the biggest part is represented by updated drivers, this time for USB, wireless (ath10k, rtlwifi), IOMMU, iiO, hwmon, Intel i915, CLK, and a little bit of MMC, PINCTRL, PCI, SCSI, and IRQ Chip. Architecture changes are also present, for ARM, ARM64/AArch64, MIPS, x86, CRIS, s390, and PA-RISC.
Besides the usual mm and core kernel noise, the Linux 4.9.3 kernel also updates the sound and networking stacks with mac80211, wireless (nl80211), Intel Skylake, Intel HDA, and Samsung I2S changes. It's a really big one, the biggest so far since the release of Linux kernel 4.9 on December 11, 2016, and if you've already managed to migrate your systems to this new stable branch, we recommend upgrading immediately.
The Linux kernel 4.9.3 source archive is available for download right now from kernel.org or via our web portal if you fancy compiling your own kernel, and it should soon land in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. We urge OS vendors to update to Linux 4.9 as soon as possible, especially if they're still using Linux 4.8, which reached end of life last week.